Cibelis

Cibelis originates from the ritual of the Vattienti, an ancient devotional practice rooted in acts of self-flagellation. Emerging from this context of embodied pain and collective memory, the work explores the fragile power of the image.

Cibelis originates from the ritual of the Vattienti in Nocera Terinese, an ancient Calabrian (Italy) devotional practice that still involves self-flagellation with the cardo. It is a circular tool embedded with glass shards that tears the skin and draws blood.

The images inhabit a space suspended between documentation and fiction, between collective memory and altered vision. Through unnatural chromatic shifts, digital insertions, and manipulations, the work dismantles the linearity of tradition and reopens it to new readings. In this reimagined world, the cardo transforms multiplying into an impossible taxonomic study of its own mutations.

Cibelis explores the fragile power of the image: photographs born of pain that reappear as uncertain simulacra. This reflection extends to the use of Artificial Intelligence, which becomes part of the process itself. With AI, the artist created the Cardo-Camera, a device that reinterprets the ritual tool of the Vattienti as a photographic machine. Each contact with the skin triggers a shot: the gesture of flagellation, once producing only blood, now generates images.